Obviously, Tim McCarver was a bit too obsessed with the man's fingers. Of course, it wouldn't be postseason baseball if McCarver wasn't obsessed with baseball minutiae. We are lucky, as a nation, that he chose a career as a catcher and not as a historian, or else we might be learning on the History Channel that Charles Martel held off the Moors at Tours because his horses had better peripheral vision, or because the Moors didn't run on three-two counts when the moon was full during Ramadan.

So, last night, we heard more about Pedro Martinez from the metacarpals downward than we did about the whole fabulous event of the game's premier showman on the game's premier stage on an autumn night on the glittering stage of the Big Room we call Gotham, where there have been so many big baseball nights in so many autumns now. (Forgive my momentary lapse of New York City tabloidom.)

A decade ago, when he was pitching for the Red Sox as the keystone to that franchise's most recent revival, the one that ended up with two world championships in three years as the century changed, he was almost an optical illusion, dealing fire from the body of the singer in a boy band. Pedro Martinez controlled the show he was putting on as precisely as he controlled the cut of his fastball or the dazzling stop-time of his changeup. Now, though, the fastball fails to crack 90, which means the changeup is all guile and guts. But his sense of the inherent drama of himself is just as fine as ever: Even before he took the mound in Yankee Stadium last night, Martinez arranged the set for himself, telling a press conference that he must be one of the most influential people in the history of both Yankee Stadiums because so many people there love to hate him.

People even sought out Don Zimmer, the ancient baseball lifer who'd charged Martinez during a playoff brawl in 2003, only to have Martinez spin him to the earth — which was probably unavoidable, since Zimmer's momentum had begun somewhere east of 1957, and Zimmer fell to earth as resoundingly as did the Red Sox team he'd memorably augured in as manager back in 1978. The brawl was a result of some bean-balling and a moment in which Martinez memorably pointed to his head, which he said indicated that he would remember who'd thrown at whom, but there were other — ahem — interpretations. Then, on another occasion, when he was beginning to fail a bit and they knocked him around, Martinez said that there was nothing anyone could do except "call them the Yankees my Daddy." Which is what they chanted at him thereafter in Yankee Stadium.

Say what you will about Pedro Martinez, but the risks he takes are never small.

Watching him this season was rather like watching Luis Tiant in the 1970s. Like Martinez, Tiant came up as a flamethrower, winning 21 games and striking out 264 batters for Cleveland in 1968, before the charge went out of his arm. He reclaimed himself with the Red Sox, mixing a baffling array of windups and arm-slots with an arsenal of pitches, and simply outsmarting batters to win 20 games three times between 1973 and 1976, including two in the 1975 World Series. In the process, he became an ongoing legend in Boston, and probably should be in the Hall of Fame.

That was whom Pedro looked like against the Dodgers in the NLCS and again last night. The ball didn't break 90, but it broke down and away, or down and in. It broke in whatever direction the hitter least expected it to break, and you could see the Dodgers trying to guess with Pedro, which always has been a sucker's game. The Yankees were doing it, too, at first — Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, especially. Pedro pitched like a knuckleballer without a knuckleball. There was clairvoyance in what he was doing, a new kind of optical illusion to replace the old.

So, he didn't win. Mark Teixeira declined to be fooled on a changeup, and Martinez left too much of a curveball over the plate to Hideki Matsui, and the two solo home runs pretty much ended any chance he had to win the game. (Significantly, neither have these players had any particular history with Martinez, nor with the way he used to command attention in the Bronx. In 1999, for example, when Martinez went 23-4, Teixeira was still in the minors and Matsui was still in Japan.) However, the wry smile he cracked in the face of substantial booing from the crowd at Steinbrenner's House of Fiscal Excess was worth every moment of the six solid innings that he pitched. That smile was a coda. Someone should have talked about it more.